Volume 49, Number 16 · October 24, 2002
The Spinoza Solution
By Stuart Hampshire
In his recently published memoir The Making of a Philosopher,[*] Colin McGinn makes a provocative suggestion. It may be found, he writes, that human beings will never be able adequately to explain to themselves the relation of their minds to their bodies and brains; that relation may remain a philosophical mystery forever. For him, reality at this point, in Kant's famous phrase, is 'not adapted to our powers of cognition.' McGinn tells us that Noam Chomsky inspired this despair. This reminded me of a conversation I had with Chomsky many years ago, on American radio, in which we discussed whether physicists, rather than trying to go further in physical science itself, might finally choose to investigate the intellectual and physical limits on our capacity to add to our physics.
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